Attribution: Photo by Brooke S. on Unsplash
By Bill Stokes
Kickass, the doorstop dog, reports that over the keeper and Phyllis’s lives of many winters there are memories of very special places of shelter from the cold and snow.
One such place, very early in the keeper’s winters, was a home-made box-like cab on a horse-drawn bobsled with a windshield and two slots just beneath it for the horses’ reins. Uncle Ralph controlled those reins as the horses lunged over hard snowdrifts to deliver milk cans to a point a half mile away where they could be picked up by a truck.
A couple of older cousins—DuWayne and Kenny, were stuffed into that cramped cab and it was full of shouts and laughter as Uncle Ralph grinned and handed the reins to an obviously wide-eyed keeper for the ride of his young life.
Why the images of that winter adventure have taken up memory space all this time is a mystery, but the keeper is happy about that.
He will tell Phyllis about it and assumes she will have a childhood winter memory about life in a Canadian lumber camp.
Winters, like wine, tend to improve with age.
